eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

April 2012

04/24/2012

Storytelling is a communitarian act,” says Orson Scott Card, “Every story creates a community, and arises under the influence of the communities the writer has been part of.”

In Invasive Procedures, co-authors, Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston tell the story of a rogue genius geneticist by the name of George Galen who wants to use virus born gene therapy to cure diseases (at least that is what he tells his “cult” of followers, “the Healers.”) In reality, Galen’s miracle virus not only cures, it transforms – ultimately turning a person into a duplicate of himself or into someone willing to act as though they were.

The “science” in the science fiction comes from passages like this:

“The trick was to figure out how to insert a cloned, healthy gene into the DNA where it belonged. Doctors could never operate on such a cellular level. But a virus could. That’s what viruses did, after all; they penetrated cell walls and deposited genes, typically viral genes that made people sick. But if those viral genes could be removed and replaced with good genes, then the virus suddenly became a good kind of virus.”

Naturally, not everyone is going to want to pay the price of losing themselves to save themselves (and that is the Faustian price George Galen seems to offer). Galen sees himself as a better human and with the modifications that he can make to his dopplegangers, he sees himself as a Utilitarian messiah. For him, the act of replacing unhealthy genes with healthy ones is only a beginning. The real work of salvation that he intends to bring involves moving on to introducing improvements. These are, what might be called “the invasive procedures” that the title is talking about. “This is a new dawning, Frank,” he argues, “A start of a different race of man. And I’m leading it.” Of course, people “don’t see that yet,” he confesses.

“They don’t comprehend what we’re doing for them. And frankly, I suspect neither do you. But again, I don’t fault you for it. It’s too new. It’s too different from the world of medicine you know. But believe me, Dr. Owens. When all is said and done, I feel confident you’ll agree that we were in the right all along.”

To Frank Hartman, the hero of the story, this is what makes Galen “the most dangerous of men” because “in his actions, he saw only good. He saw himself as a hero.”

Frank’s opposition is clear early on. Though he has himself lost a daughter to Leukemia, he suspects any science with unknown side-effects. “Don’t think of the virus as medicine,” Frank explains to a potential client of Galen’s,

“Think of it as a means of altering our genetic makeup. That’s never a good idea. There could be repercussions we don’t know about. Side effects. Plus, rapid healing may not be the only alteration Galen gave us.”

“You shouldn’t,” said Frank. “Galen created something that he may not have fully understood or known how to control.”

In the end, the debate comes down to the potential for science to be used or misused. Frank Hartman refuses to take potentially damaging risks for potentially messianic solutions to real medical problems. Galen’s character is ten parts vision; one part foresight. Hartman’s is the opposite. “Do you have any idea how many hundreds of people we could have cured every day together as the Council?” one of Galen’s dopplegangers asks Frank after his plot has been foiled?

“How many lives we could have bettered? Science saves, Frank,” said Dolores. “Always has. And yet, whenever that spark of discovery appears, civilization also poops out someone like you, someone who crashes the whole thing to hell, and people who didn’t have to die, do.”

She made a face. “Does it please you to know there are sick children in this world? Is that it? Is that what you want? Are you some kind of sadist or something? You get a kick out of seeing people die slowly of fatal diseases? I’m changing the world, Frank. I’m empowering people. You may not agree with our religion, but you can’t deny the fact that we’re doing good.”

I confess, as a novel, Invasive Procedures would have read much better if Orson Scott Card had written it rather than just promoted it. Aaron Johnson has, it seems obvious, written a screenplay for a film here. As a Hollywood story, it might sell. But as a novel on par with Ender’s Game or even Lovelock, another novel about bioethics that Orson Scott sponsored, it is not even close.

Still the bioethical issues that it raises are interesting; perhaps not so much from the scientific angle as much as from the attitudinal. Who are the bioethical heroes today? Those who take risks? Or those who stop risk-takers from taking them? The author of this story sides with the later and does so by making the risk-taker hero wanna-be a cult-leading egomaniac. I think the story would be more interesting if both hero and anti-hero were seen as equals morally.

Question for Comment: Would you be willing to subject yourself to an injection of virus born gene therapy to save yourself from a debilitating genetic defect?

04/22/2012

Why prolong suffering before dyeing if you don’t have to? That is the question that you get to think and feel about if you sign yourself to watch this heart-wrenching film about the Death-with-Dignity law of Oregon and Washington States. It had me weeping in parts.

But first, some background.

Suffering is not new to the human experience. The Bible’s oldest book (Job) appears to be a rhetorical argument about suffering and it was not a novelty when it was written. In ancient Babylon, one man recorded his experience of slow death (perhaps to cancer) in the following words,

Marduk! The skies cannot sustain the weight of his hand,

Marduk! The skies cannot sustain the weight of his hand, His gentle palm rescues the moribund. When he is angry, graves are dug, His mercy raised the fallen from disaster. When he glowers, protective spirits take flight, He has regard for and turns to the one whose god has forsaken him. Harsh is his punishments, he.... in battles (?) When moved to mercy, he quickly feels pain like a mother in labor. He is bull-headed in love of mercy Like a cow with a calf, he keeps turning around watchfully. His scourge is barbed and punctures the body, His bandages are soothing, they heal the doomed. He speaks and makes one incur many sins, On the day of his justice sin and guilt are dispelled. He is the one who makes shivering and trembling, Through his sacral spell chills and shivering are relieved. Who raises the flood of Adad, the blow of Erra, Who reconciles the warthful god and goddess The Lord divines the gods´ inmost thoughts But no god understand his behavior, Marduk divines the gods´s inmost thoughts

But no god understand his behavior! As heavy his hand, so compassionate his heart As brutal his weapons, no life-sustaining his feelings, Without his consent, who could cure his blow? Against his will, who could sin and escape? I will proclaim his anger, which runs deep, like a fish, He punished me abruptly, then granted life I will teach the people, I will instruct the land to fear To be mindful of him is propitious for ...... After the Lord changed day into night And the warrior Marduk became furious with me, My own god threw me over and disappeared, My goddess broke rank and vanished He cut off the benevolent angel who walked beside me My protecting spirit was frightened off, to seek out someone else My vigor was taken away, my manly appearance became gloomy, My dignity flew off, my cover leaped away. Terrifying signs beset me I was forced out of my house, I wandered outside, My omens were confused, they were abnormal every day, The prognostication of diviner and dream interpreter could not explain what I was undergoing. What was said in the street portended ill for me, When I lay down at nights, my dream was terrifyng The king, incarnation of the gods, sun of his people His heart was enraged with me and appeasing him was impossible Courtiers were plotting hostile against me, They gathered themselves to instigate base deeds: If the first !I will make him end his life" Says the second "I ousted him from his command" So likewise the third "I will get my hands on his post!" "I will force his house!" vows the fourth As the fifth pants to speak Sixth and seventh follow in his train!" (literally in his protective spirit) The clique of seven have massed their forces, Merciless as fiends, equal to demons. So one is hteir body, united in purpose, Their hearts fulminate against me, ablaze like fire. Slander and lies they try to lend credence against me My mouth once proud was muzzled like a .... My lips, which used to discourse, became those of a dead man. My resounding call struck dumb, My proud head bent earthward, My stout heart turned feeble for terror, My broad breast brushed aside by a novice, My far-reaching arms pinned down by flimsy matting, I, who walked proudly, learned slinking, I, so grand, became servile, To my vast family, I became a loner, As I went through the streets, ears were pricked up at me, I would enter the palace, eyes would squint at me, My city was glowering at me like an enemy, Belligerent and hostile would seem my land! My brother became my foe, My friend became a malignant demon, My comrade would denounce me savagely, My colleague was constantly keeping the taint to this weapons, My best friend would pinch off my life. My slave cursed me openly in the assembly of gentlefolk My slavegirl defamed me before the rabble. An acquaintance would see me and make himself scarce,

My family disowned me, A pit awaited anyone speaking well of me, While he who was uttering defamation of me forged ahead. One who relayed base things about me had a god for his help For the one who said "What a pity about him!" death came early, The one of no help, his life became charmed, I had no one to go at my side, nor saw I a champion. They parceled my possessions among the rifffaff, The sources of my watercourses they blocked with muck, They chased the harvest song from my fields, They left my community deathly still, like that of a ravaged foe. They let another assume my duties, They appointed an outsider to my prerogatives. By day sighing, by night lamentation, Monthly, trepidation, despair the year, I moaned like a dove all my days, I let out groans as my song, My eyes are forced to look through constant crying, My eyelids are smarting through of tears. My face is darkened from the apprehensions of my heart, Terror and pain have jaundiced my face. The.... of my heart is quaking in ceaseless apprehension. ..... like a burning fire, Like the bursting of a flame falshehood beset me, .... lamentation, my imploring! The speech of lips was senseless, like a moron´s, When I tried to talk, my conversation was gibberish. I watch, that in daylight good will come upon me! The moon will change, the sun will shine!

Numerous Biblical authors make an attempt to explain suffering in ways consistent with beliefs about a good and powerful God. Sometimes, it is seen as punitive – a judgment upon those who are wicked and will never repent. Other times it is seen as disciplinary – a rod of chastisement meant to restore a person or community to their moral sense. In other places, it is the consequence of righteous behavior that provokes an attack from the “dark side” (as with Job). In other places, it is a method of testing or proving, a mechanism for becoming aware of flaws in one’s faith. For the prophet Hosea, suffering is a medium whereby one learns what it feels like to be God. For Jesus, it is seen as redemptive – that is, others are spared suffering by the sacrifice to suffering of a willing victim. The apostle Paul sees it as a way to gain insight into the experience of those that one serves. He also sees it as an opportunity to share in the suffering of Christ – to better understand and share his God’s own experience of suffering. Lastly, it can be a mechanism of pressure, bringing one to a state of humility and helplessness, often a prerequisite to leaps of faith.

While Judeo Christian society probably rarely thinks of these various and sundry rationales for the endurance of suffering, it may well be at the heart of its resistance to Death-with-Dignity movements. Somehow, it regards suffering as purposeful in human beings and thus, while few would object to “putting down” a family pet that was suffering needlessly, they would be opposed to the same expression of “compassion” in human end-of-life decisions. In a way, this notion of purposeful suffering paradoxically comes up against the value of compassion and the injunction to relieve the suffering of those in pain.

How to Die in Oregon is a film that religious conservatives should see and talk about. With thousands of people retiring every day now, this is an issue that each and every State will need to deal with. Baby-boomers are just beginning to see the tunnel at the end of their light and no doubt, they will want to make this pain reducing option available to themselves. Vermont being one of the oldest States in the Union will soon put it on the forefront of the debate.

Question for Comment: Do you think that there might be benefits to suffering that might outweigh the obvious advantages of shortening it in end-of-life decision processes? Or is it simply cruel to deprive people of the option to end their own lives when they deem them not worth the pain of life?

I suspect that the movie The Help will not be shown at the annual meeting of the Jackson, Mississippi Chamber of Commerce and time soon. It must be an odd thing coming from a place like Jackson Mississippi. I mean, I have a hard time visualizing a movie called Vermont Burning.

Still, the Association of Black Women Historians has taken a negative view of the film and the book upon which it was based, suggesting in its critique that in some ways, the portrayal it gives of the lives of black domestic maids is too gentle in its condemnation of practices which were far more than “mean” or even petty. For that, I suppose one would have to refer to Mississippi Burning or Eyes on the Prize. In some ways, The Help goes about as far as it can while remaining a PG movie. It raises the question: Can people be informed gradually without being misinformed? Perhaps something at the end of the film that said “As bad as this was, it should be understood that it was worse” would have sufficed for the ABWH?

One of the themes of the story however has to do with the contagious nature of courage. One courageous person becomes two. Two becomes three. Three becomes ten. Ten becomes eleven. Eleven becomes a hundred. A hundred becomes a book. A book becomes a thousand. A thousand becomes a film. A film becomes an Oscar.

“God says we need to love our enemies,” Abilene says as she walks away from the job she has just lost for speaking out. “It hard to do. But it can start by telling the truth. No one had ever asked me what it feel like to be me. Once I told the truth about that, I felt free.”

Question for Comment: What experiences of your life would be most worthy of a book?

04/19/2012

Curtis Cate’s biography of George Sand suffers somewhat from excessive detail. He seems to have determined to tell the reader everything about a life that is often interesting. In many respects, George Sand can be considered a feminine Lord Byron though she lives just slightly wiser and a good deal longer. She ascribes to basic Romantic movement assumptions about nature, freedom, and the moral absolute that one must live with passion as their fundamental principle. Cate organizes Sand’s life by the principle men she finds herself in relationship with, and there are many.

In the course of her amorous pilgrimage, she lived with Casamir Dudevant (her first and I think only husband). She has a fling with Aurelien de Seze who she meets in the Pyrenees. He is replaced with Jules Sandeau (from whom George Sand will take her pen name). Sandeau will have to step aside for the romantic poet, Alfred Musset, who will be followed in turn by the Italian doctor, Pietro Pagello. Pietro will soon become a terzo comodo (an embarrassing third party) and find himself replaced again by Musset who’s second chance will only be temporary. Here, things get a little confusing. She falls in love with a married man, Michael de Bouges, and a guy by the name of Charles Didier. “My misfortune is to throw myself wholeheartedly at each fine soul I encounter,” she writes him. And the parade continues. Messieur Bocage, and then Mallefille, a playright I believe, wanders into her life and is replaced in time with her relationship to the piano playing composer, Chopin. I can’t remember the others but I think there are several.

Usually, the transitions between these romances are messy affairs of over-lapping desire and disappointment accompanied with a good deal of jealousy, betrayal, and sometimes violence.

Early in her first marriage, George Sand had suggested that the key to making marriage work was sublimation of personality. “The dissentions which are born from the diversity of tastes and characters are only too real in most households,” she writes,

“… Each time one or the other of the two spouses wishes to stick to his ideas and never yield, he will be unhappy. It is essential I believe that one of the two in marrying should practice self-abnegation, should renounce not only his will but even his opinion, should firmly strive to see through the others eyes, to like what he likes, etc. What torture! What a life of bitterness, when one is united to one one detests. What a sad uncertainty, what a charmless future when one is married to a stranger. But also, what an inexhaustible source of happiness when one obeys what one loves! Each privation is a new pleasure … The only question is if it is up to the man or the woman to remake himself thus on the model of the other, and since all power is on the side of the beard, and since, besides, men are incapable of such a degree of attachment, it is necessarily up to us to bend in obedience.” (p. 93)

But George Sand was to find that her personality was an irrepressible thing and it refused to comply with her own intentions. In the chapters entitled “Romance in the Pyrenes” and “A Curiously Platonic Triangle” she tells of the impossibility of remaining faithful to a husband who, she describes as follows: “Neither the cold nor the mud keeps him from being out of doors and he only comes inside to eat and to snore.”

She tries to put a dagger in the heart of the affair with Aurelien de Seze by insisting that all her correspondence with him be censored by mutual friends. “The taboos imposed on their correspondence were crippling,” Cate writes,

“There was little they could do in their open letters but limit themselves to innocuous descriptions of social events, speak of encounters with mutual friends and relatives, and keep the old fires smothered beneath a hatch of feigned indifference.” (p. 124)

“– a frenzied pursuit of ecstatic rapture- a mystic yearning for the unattainably sublime, a desperate craving for the ineffably tender, for what James Joyce so beautifully terms “the soft sweet swoon of sin.”

“Love for me is a veneration, a cult,” Sand writes in one of her letters describing why she was leaving one lover for another, “And if my god lets himself suddenly sink into the dung, it is impossible for me to lift him up again and adore him.” Soon she is with someone else who she claims may be the one because “It is the first time I have loved without suffering at the end of three days.”

“I like noise, storms, and even danger,” writes Sand,

“and if I were selfishly inclined, I would like to see a revolution every morning so amusing do I find it. In addition to which being penniless and with nothing to lose but my life (about which I care little) and with all my parents and friends being so cowardly that they wet their britches and hide in their cellars as soon as the bugles sound, I really have nothing to lose.”

Over the course of her life she would make many trips to exotic places with fascinating people to maintain that sense of adventure. In some ways, her life was designed to provoke dramas. “Everyone wants to dabble in the new and winds up dabbling in the ridiculous,” she writes, “Monsters are in fashion. Let us produce monsters. I am giving birth to a most agreeable one right now.” “Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age,” she advised, “and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, and one's inner happiness.”

And yet happiness eludes her as often as not. One of the many pessimistic notions Aurore (George Sand’s real name) had picked up from Charles Nordier and which echoes through her novel Lelia notes Curtis Cate, “is that individuals of the different sexes are not physically made to live eternally together; that erotically they were originally designed by nature for casual and temporary encounters …” This notion that people may be “designed” for serial monogamies (even though the pursuit of the practice constantly flings Sand into despair) is one of George Sand’s more pervasive influences. “At eighteen one adores,” says a French proverb, “At twenty one loves. At thirty one desires. At forty one thinks it over.” The author notes that George Sand needed someone to take care of and someone to care for her and could not find both in a same person. Her life is a constant war between chaos and control. “I am still young, she insists in her late thirties,

“and although I tell other men that I have an ancient’s calm, my blood is hot and in the presence of an intoxicatingly beautiful nature love boils inside me like the sap of life in the universe.”

Love, the French poet, Chamfort writes is “the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two epidermises.” George Sand’s relationships seem always to suffer at that moment when the mist of fantasy inevitably disintegrates and she is left face to face with the ever-present unromantic reality – in other words, “work.”

One of her lovers, the poet, Alfred Musset expressed her predicament quite well in one of his poems.

"Ah woe betide the man who on a woman’s body Seeks to smother with his kisses The phantom, of another; who embracing beauty

Seeks the taste of the ideal on the lip of reality”

Question for Comment: Should one ever expect to taste the ideal on the lip of reality?